In my last post, I wrote about the passing of someone I would consider a friend. As an update, I would like to tell you others have also been crushed by it and have set up Remembering Cory.

Also check out this special episode of The Half-Eaten Hat Show in which his friend plays music that Gimpi liked.

I awoke this morning and happened to notice some text in an IRC Channel I idle in often. I have known most of the people in that channel for years. Although we don’t chat as much as we used to "back in the day", it is still nice to hear how they are doing and good news does brighten my day.

Today was not one of those days. The black screen with white text could not have looked any gimmer. The chat was about the passing of a very unique and exeptional person.

With the passing of Cory "Gimpi" Carrier, our world has just become a darker place and heaven just gained an angel with a great sense of humor and outlook on life.

With his passing, even my normal wordy nature, fails. I am in a state of wishing I could have known him even better. He certainly was high on my wish list of IRC friends to meet, regretting not making that list a higher priority. I am not Alice Cooper. I DO cry. I have been doing so off and on all day.

Today, as I am sure many other long time IRC friends have. spent most of my day fighting tears. No, I did not know him as well as others. Most of us, like here and here are not saying much. I suspect, like myself, we just don’t know what to say.

I suppose if one gave the idea more thought we should expect it. The Internet seems to be a reminder of all they are isolated from.

Here are a few article on and blogs from the cold place:

• Cool antartica- a nice list with lots of good links
• Antartica Blog – last post was 24 October
• 75 Degrees South – lots of videos here
• Life In Antartica

For thos of you needing news on why I have been rather inactive, it is due to a number of reasons:

1. I have just taken on a new job that wiill require a substantial investment of time.
2. I am in the process of moving agian. This is going to take some time as well.
3. My connection has been a modem only and this is a so I am baudly impaired.

Fear not though, or maybe best said fear more, I hope to be back in full swing no later than January. I will actually have a fat DSL connection with a room dedicated to my internet passion. Till then, thanks for bearing with me.

The reason I have been off the net of late is that I have been busy traveling the country. This has led to the re-ignition of two old habits; photography and reading. Keep checking Lumpy’s Corner and my Flickr Site for the photos. Today I thought I might talk about e-books, more specifically, e-books for a PDA.

The bad news is that the new job is not going to work out. The good news is that I already accepted another offer that is even more so a step in a desired direction. The great news is that it will be a regular job with regular hours and I will be back blogging again… Now back to the subject.

This site is usually about how technology and cyberspace have changed things. I am composing this on an iPAQ. On that device I have; a dictionary, 2 translations of the Bible, 2 Bible commentaries, 2 Bible dictionaries, a Bible devotional, maps, a word processor, a media player and, at any given time, 5-6 books. The "pocket PC" is even smaller than the tricorder Spock used to explore new worlds. I think enough has been said about impact.

Here are some of the things I have discovered today:

• Thanks Beth, previously I mentioned Google Books but Beth mentions more by referring to this article that mentions many others:
  • Project Gutenberg – the original e-book project started way back in 1971
  • The British Columbia International Digital Library
• Here are some I just found via google…
  • Manybooks.net – I found a All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites there. The site is easy to navigate and has a nice, in my opinion, interface for the user. 15 formats were available for the title I downloaded.
  • Memoware – seems to be geared toward Palm format
  • Free eBooks for your PDA – self descriptive
  • Free titles for Microsoft Reader
• Not free but not expensive
  • eReader – a very nice looking site
  • eReads

Can tags be use to auto discover hierarchies? That is a very good question. The issue is that there is a difference between tagA –> tagB and tagB–>tagA. Nonetheless, associations are clearly there and can be made. The issue seems more of how well they can be made and used.

As I said though, I still am digging through this. Here are some more links and, hopefully, I can get some input as I dig further and think on it more. One thing for sure though, I have become a tagaholic… I am becoming even more convinced that my bold bullets in this past post are very, very true. I have also become a rather addicted "delicious stalker", which is a person who follows and learns from the tagging of others by adding them to their network.
(I added Mr. Kasley to my network taking the total up to 16.) But it is going to get worse… I have discovered tagyu!!! I don’t know how I ever missed it.

Here are some links, some for brain food and others to hook you on tagyu.

• Extracting Semantics from Folksonomy – The link points to the Google cache, I don’t know why but I can not seem to connect to the original post. It is a very good quick look at some of the issues on the subject. Do not miss the two links at the bottom either.
• Library Thingy is now using both tags and subjects.I am simply going to describe this with a quote from the article.
  

  "Now you can look at a book and see both the user-created tags as well as the librarian-assigned subject headings. This puts us in the middle of the age old debate: tags or subject headings? Folksonomies or taxonomies? Ok, maybe the question isn’t quite that old, but it’s certainly debated. Subject analysis is a fuzzy discipline – decisions on "aboutness" are hard. But is it necessarily a question of one over the other? Can they work together at all? &quot

  ;

• Tagyu.com – Paste in text and get tags back.
• The State of the Union tagged – Some one used tagyu for the State of the Union Addressees for the past three presidents.
• A bookmarklette for tagyu
• Movable Type plugin for tagyu up and running at Lumpys Corner very soon
• WordPress Plugin up and running here!

The RSS feed publishing service Feedburner has just announced a partnership with Newsweek to provide a wide variety of services supporting Newsweek RSS feeds. The magazine’s online component offers nearly 40 feeds on numerous topics. Beyond feed delivery and analytics, the partnership will also utilize Feedburner’s API enabled FeedFlare service – whereby feed items can be followed with buttons for functions like tagging the item into Del.icio.us or emailing it.

I think this great news even though I am not a big fan of Newsweek. I am just happy to see that some of the established media is getting with the techno-trend and not combating them.

You can read the full article here

Recently, there has been much concern about information overload. Now psychologically speaking, such issues are caused by an individuals inability to adapt to their environment and/or modify their environment. There is no doubt that modernization has changed our environment. The Internet and the PC are part of it. It seems obvious that the rate of change is increasing as well. There is much more to it than what has become known as information overload. We are rapidly heading to an era of new enlightenment or an age where we suffocate and choke on a ceaseless stream of information, which shall prevail?

Over my next few posting here, that is what I shall ramble about. Some points shall seem obvious, others, so accepted that they may be taken for granted and scarcely noticed. I should also make it clear that these observations are largely aimed at what most would term western society. If you are some remote desert isle where survival is your only focus, it likely will not apply. Then again, if that is your situation, you’re not reading this. Not yet anyhow… Soon enough, even the desert isles shall have connectivity.

Consider the following points:

• We are expected to be able to extract the information from the Internet and various Intranets. To the point that the term "Google it" has meaning. (Less than two decades ago, the term "gopher it" was no more than an inside joke.)
• We are, compared to a few decades ago, expected to have better organizational skills. Two decades ago, voicemail and answering machines were high-tech. They are now common place.
• We are, since the Windows OS, expected to multi-task or, at the very least, switch with minimal effort from one task to the next.
• We are expected to be more "connected".
• We are expected to process more information.
• We are expected to access this information expediently.

This is an immense topic. Immense in items to discuss and in magnitude of importance. One is pressed to even find a starting point. I am also not even attempting to cover all aspects of this topic. I am not going to offer solutions. I am simply observing a few items in this post and intend on digging deeper into the matters in future postings. It is the beginning of this blog’s new direction.

During my morning ritual of cooking breakfast, I happened on the point I wish to start from. I am rather anal regarding meal preparation in the sense that I use the burners and kitchen appliances to attempt to make each meal item’s cooking complete at the same time. I like hot meals and I do not like food to sit after it is cooked. I multi-task. (This gives me more time to read my e-mails and feeds.)

Now, cooking soft-boiled eggs is not very difficult. I, however, desire eggs, toast, hash browns and coffee. I also want them all complete at the same time and I want the process to take the minimum total amount of possible time. Let’s call this the "breakfast objective". I want the shortest time for the total time for my meal and want each individual process to be complete at the same time. If I fail at either, I fail at the objective.

Now pause as I eat my soft boiled eggs. Other than your stove top, what household appliance is geared to multi-task? I can think of two: one being what I am now typing on and the other being the mini-version of the same that I carry in my pocket. I do not know when we first came to use the term "multi-tasking" to describe our behavior. I never recalled the term multi-tasking being used to describe an employee’s efficiency until after the Internet and the PC became common. Do you?

The Internet and the PC have changed what is expected of us. It has changed what is expected of our performance, knowledge and, like it or not, socially. We are expected to process more information. It has certainly made aspects of our lives easier but it has also forced new stressors on us. Today, I am going to examine a few of these "techno-stressors".

I have already mentioned one type of stressor as an example. I shall skip forward to a "volume" problem; information overload, and return to my example latter.

Before the Internet and the PC, how many suffered from "information overload"?

The Internet is information. It is a vast sea of just about every type of information known to man. The amount of information has grown, will grow and eventually the whole universe will melt into one giant digital ball of information… heh. Seriously, however, there has always been a great deal of information available. It was not as easily accessed. Now that it is easily accessed, we are expected to know how to access it.

This trend of information bombardment began with the printing press. One could even argue that it actually began when the first cave dweller recorded his day by drawing on a cave wall. Nonetheless, it has steadily increased with the introduction of each new technology. Information overload, according to Wikipedia, was first used in the book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. That was 1970. It is a real issue in our society. It is also referred to as e-mail overload, information smog, information fatigue syndrome and technobable. It is but one aspect of new stressors in our technologically advancing world.

If my breakfast scenario had hundreds and hundreds of possible methods to completion and I had no clue as to which method to choose, how much more stressful would it be? I wonder how often committee members recess to create a PowerPoint presentation for a goal and ignore the easel and pad of paper or dry erase board? It is becoming easier and easier to be distracted from the objective.

Chapter one of the book Future Shock starts out as follows:

In the three short decades between now and the twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future. Citizens of the world’s richest and most technologically advanced nations, many of them will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time. For them, the future will have arrived too soon.

I feel the above quote is almost prophetic. I remind the reader that the publication date of the above quote was 1970. Move forward thirty years to another very good read on the subject, We Have the Information You Want, But Getting It Will Cost You: Being Held Hostage by Information Overload by Mark R. Nelson, and he characterizes it by:

"Information overload is the inability to extract needed knowledge from an immense quantity of information for one of many reasons. Wurman (Wurman, Richard Saul. Information Anxiety. New York: Doubleday. 1989.) explains that information overload can occur when a person:"

• " does not understand available information"
• "feels overwhelmed by the amount of information to be understood"
• "does not know if certain information exists"
• "does not know where to find information"
• "knows where to find information, but does not have the key to access it."

Not only has the volume of information increased but the rate at which the volume grows is increasing as well. It is almost like a bacterial colony in exponential growth. This increase in the rate of change applies to every technology as well. Each tick of the clock makes it harder to "keep up" with the ever-present change.

Only two decades ago a modem transferred data at a baud rate that made 12 hours seem like a pretty quick transfer. Soon we will be able to download and entire DVD movie in only minutes. This creates a self sustaining wild fire. The less the time cost to transfer information, the more information we transfer and share. More speed means more volume. Processors move faster, connections move faster, hard drives move faster and store more data and everything is more, more, more. How are we going to increase the capacity and speed of the human being?

So here we sit in the infancy of the twenty-first century, flooded by information and must do one of the following: modify our behavior (adapt) and/or modify our environment. For today, let us examine some of the external factors that contribute to this new malady.

Hindsight is credited as always having perfect vision. How are we surviving the "collision" mentioned in future shock? Before I dive into this topic, I must confess that I am one who is eager to adapt to new technology. I embrace it, I welcome it and, I am rather obsessed by it. I do not, however, notice this behavior in many others and, in fact, most seem rather hesitant to change. I also must confess to very much feeling information overload while attempting to draft this material. I have scraped drafts entirely, which I have never done before. There is so much data on the matter it is difficult to decide where to start and what to include.

Alvin Toffler has had an insight and an influence regarding this matter for over 30 years. Reading just a few chapters of his above-mentioned book makes it very clear why he grabbed the attention of Al Gore and Newt Gingrich. Toffler feels stress from this type of change is inevitable. Society forces it on us. In today’s work force, we are expected to multi-task and process much more information than in generations before. Our success in the work force requires us to adapt. Furthermore, no body likes to seem unable to use technology. I know that I have heard people mock others because "they don’t even know how to open a Word document&qout;. It is unfortunate but seems to be a reality that our ability to use the technology shall impact social status as well.

Here in lies the real problem. We must change.

I have mentioned the fact that we are expected to multi-task several times. How well do human beings actually multi-task? The truth is, usually, not that well. We do not fully understand exactly how working memory functions and various models explain various observations regarding it. We may well be wasting more time due to task switching, memory interference and frustration. The verdict is far from fully in on this matter but there is conflicting evidence whether multi-tasking makes us more efficient. Multi-tasking may well be less productive than a focused attack.

A more recent read on something similar to information overload and another term of description is Technostress. The authors also have a web site and have done many studies to give us some empirical data.

One study is particularly relevant to this topic. They examined technology use over a 49 month period. There were five separate 18 month studies. (Some of the start dates overlapped therefore the total time for the entire study was 49 months.) Some of the findings are exactly what we would expect. Some others are a little less intuitive.

The following seemed rather obvious:

• Use of all studied technologies increased.
• Most adaptors (people using the technology) have the "prove it first" attitude regarding the use of new technologies
• Use of technology increased both at work and after work hours

The above mentioned items seemed to be pretty obvious to me. The study also noted that the level of "technostress", a composite item, which is a gauge of how complex and involved the technology is, was the largest factor in predicting increase in usage. In other words, more complex technologies are becoming more frequently used and used more often.

The second surprising result regarded acceptance of the new technology had some interesting results based on the training quality. Those observed were most likely to embrace the new tech if they either received excellent training or no training. Average or poor training resulted in poor attitudes regarding the use of the new technology. Those who evaluated their training as average were most likely to not accept the new technology.

These results should concern every single business and manager. This means that if the "average" business gives "average" training to the "average" employee, they will most likely leave the employee disliking the new technology. This implies that most businesses are defeating the purpose of implementing new technologies by training that is anything less than excellent.

Perhaps no training with the expectation that employees should become proficient on their own will become the norm. What new stress will that create? I can still hear co-workers cursing computers over e-mail problems because "IT gives us no help". The other option is to settle for only excellent training. This, however, defies statistical probability.

Another area of debate is the fact that we are supposed to be able to find information quickly and easily. Yet in a show of hands survey, most people do not feel their Intranet engines are adequate.

We have collided with our own technology. We have created processors that we are expected to use and, many of us, have no clue and are given no real guidance as to how to do so. The problem is magnified by the fact that is seems that the greater the complexity of the technology, the higher the likeliness that we will be mandated to use it.

There is a commonality in all of this. The first point that may be so obvious that we do not notice it anymore. The stress is from our expectations. We are expected to be able to use this new technology. It is, in fact, techno-peer-pressure or techno-info-pressure. It is an ever rising expectation and it is rising at a quicker and quicker rate. Many common users are now feeling inadequately trained and unprepared. There is so much pressure regarding this matter that some are even attempting to have information overload become a valid psychological disorder. I shall dive more into many of these issues in future postings here. At that time, I will offer more links and information on the subjects. For now, I shall resign admitting that this topic has hit me hard with information overload.

The "breakfast objective" is now much more complicated. I must not only time everything perfectly but I must consider which stove to use, which method to use and which pots to use. It is complicated by the fact that before I even reach a conclusion newer stoves, methods and pots have come into existence. Many of us now feel a "cyber-world stess" that is much like trying to tread water in the current of the Niagara. Is it me or is that roar down stream getting louder?

Add to my breakfast problem the fact that there is a real social pressure to generate a solution and post it to the web. More and more of us are now expected to assimilate and share information. Each moment the expectations regarding our proficiency to do so are increasing. I am not even going to offer a solution here but merely wonder how soon it will be before our expectations exceed our abilities.

The example of cooking a meal is similar in some ways to using the Internet and a PC. If one would equate the food being processed to data, the pots and pans to the software and the stove to the hardware, we can use it as a good parallel. The eggs you cook with are usually not of a concern to us. They are pre-packaged, dated with and expiration and considered safe. The same is not true for data and information. Granted there are trusted sources but in this day and age a user must also sift through pages of bad information and spam. How much more difficult would you breakfast become if you were responsible for sorting, packaging and assuring the safety of the eggs?

Now how about the frying pan? Mine is about 15 years old. What if I had to make sure that it was patched, virus free and up to date? Add to it the fact that I would have to make sure it is compatible with my stove. What if I had gotten a new stove and the pan is no longer supported by the newer model? I could go on and on with this example but I hope the reader as gotten the point.

There is one certain thing evident. More information and change are part of the new era. We are all going to have to learn to adapt to it. It is a new mandate in the new century. Use the analogy of your choice but become either a better cook or a better swimmer. If you fail to do so you will either have a bad meal or a series waterfall ride.

I managed to overcome my technostress regarding this post by printing the draft, shutting off the computer, and scribbling revisions by hand. I achieved my breakfast objective by using the old stove, pots and pans at my disposal. If I were to find my self in a swift current, I would use the swimming stroke I know to the best of my ability to do the best I could rather than my PDA to research more effective techniques. My "obsolete" machine served me well enough to write this post. If you read this far, did I not achieve my objective?

I said that I would not offer any solutions with this article but I reckon I lied a bit. I am of the opinion that far too often we are now letting the techno-glitz of today’s world blind our objective. I have seen meetings adjourn so that an individual could put together a power point presentation when the dry erase board in the room would have sufficed. I know people that take their PDA to the restroom with them so they do not miss and IM. In today’s techno-world we will have to learn to use the technology and not be owned by it.

In my breakfast example, the final product is what matters. If I cook a good meal, the recipient does not fret over what it was cooked on. Some stress adapting to the new era is inevitable. A computer and the Internet are tools. They are used to produce things. Any time and individual tries to achieve something there is some degree of stress involved. Are you adding to it? If you are trying to do a power point presentation when a dry erase board will suffice, you are adding unnecessarily to your stress.

I drafted the electronic portion of this mainly on a 1 gig AMD CPU. I know a good number of people who consider this machine obsolete. Reading this post, can one even tell the speed of the CPU that was used to draft it? I found thousands of relevant articles to this subject but used only a few. At one point, I was paralyzed by the volume of data. I disconnected and managed to write. If I included all of these articles, would you even bother to read and even longer post?

In today’s world we are going to have to adapt to resist the temptation of finding a perfect and complete solution. Sometimes less is more. In many cases, techno-stress is being blinded by the volume of information and the glitz of the process. We loose focus of the end product.

I am by nature a perfectionist regarding many things. I also have a high need for achievement. The volume of information on this subject clouded my vision. I became obsessed with finding the perfect solution. My stress was due to my expectations. My perception was focused on finding it. In the end, the stress reliever was to disconnect and grab a red pen. The result was a less than perfect solution but I still had my breakfast and finished a post.

Thanks for reading and I welcome your comments and suggestions.